Music-List Mondays: “Bread and Wine”

Music-List Mondays: Where VibrantCatholic chooses a song and talks about it.

Song of the week: Surprise! There’s actually not a specific song this week…I’ll be discussing the words “bread and wine” in countless songs.

I was paging through the Gather hymnal the other day looking for something to play as a communion reflection when I noticed something…the majority of the songs had the words bread or wine written somewhere in the lyrics or title:

“Bread of Life from Heaven”

“Jesus, Wine of Peace”

“Let Us Be Bread”

“One Bread, One Body”

“I Am the Bread of Life”

“Jesus, Hope of the World”

And those were just a few.

So, I continued on with my thought process. If these songs constantly tell the listener that all the Body and Blood of Christ is just a simple bread and wine, then wouldn’t the listener not fully understand or believe transubstantiation?

I see this happening when people refer to the Body and Blood of Christ as merely bread and wine. By using those two words, it takes away from the full beauty of what happens during the Eucharistic Prayer. Simply put, it waters down the True Presence of Christ.

By replacing the words with more general terms, the reverence and meaning is condensed and fails to remind the congregation what is truly happening. When many left Jesus for saying they should eat his flesh, they didn’t accept his teaching. They couldn’t believe it, and they wanted him to speak of it symbolically or metaphorically.

As Catholics though, we do believe that the bread and wine is then transformed into the true Body and Blood of Jesus Christ at transubstantiation. When we simply reduce it to terms like “bread and wine,” we are forgetting the basis of what we believe.

Many who state they’re Catholic say they don’t believe in the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I think one of the main reasons is because we have songs that get into their minds with the message that it’s just simply us “eating bread and drinking wine.” It also is a part of the reason as to why the Eucharist isn’t as revered as the Body and Blood of Christ ought to be.

These are just my recent thoughts, I’d love to hear your perspective on this, too! Thank you for reading!